Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 86
August 16, 2019
What to see this week in the UK
From Blinded By the Light to Fleabag, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
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August 9, 2019
Hirst's bronze giants run riot while Saatchi goes raving – the week in art
Hungary’s radiant radicals, the return of acid house and a giant leap for the Maritime Museum – all in your weekly dispatch
Dóra Maurer
This Hungarian artist mixes formal beauty with dissident chaos in an impressive range of works from rigorous film and photography to joyfully liberated paintings.
• Tate Modern, London, until 5 July
What to see this week in the UK
From Sophie to Oedipus, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...August 5, 2019
Dóra Maurer review – the dissident who rebelled in colour
Tate Modern, London
From black and white films made in her kitchen to glorious geometric designs, the Hungarian artist’s career has blossomed since the end of communist rule
Dóra Maurer’s impressive creativity since the end of Soviet control and communist one-party rule in Hungary in 1989 is an exception to a dispiriting rule. Many creative artists whose imaginations rebelled against the communist states of eastern Europe faded after their countries became democratic. Was the challenge of dissidence a spur to creativity? Or is capitalist democracy destructive in its own banal, populist way? The novels of Milan Kundera and films of Jan Švankmajer are examples of that lost urgency, and – in Švankmajer’s case – funding, after the fall of communism. So it’s heartening that Maurer, who spent much of her life making dissident art in a totalitarian state, has done her best work since that state collapsed.
It’s worth looking at her artistic life backwards. Go right to the end of Tate Modern’s enlightening, and free, survey of her subversive career to be delighted by the paintings she does today. Maurer’s flights of colour include interleaving waves of blue, green and yellow, curves of red rushing towards blue and orange rectangles, and interlapping grids of too many colours to count. The most recent of these joyous paintings that spin off across walls and around corners as they defy the idea of a closed picture surface is dated 2016. Maurer, born in 1937 in Budapest, is in the swim of creativity today and producing paintings that are simultaneously installations, with hard, bright geometries knocked sideways by some crazy libertarian impulse.
Continue reading...August 2, 2019
Ravishing Riley, seaside celebrations and anti-Trump seesaws – the week in art
Landscapes in Orkney, bouncy abstracts in St Ives, and a wealth of artworks between and beyond – all in your weekly dispatch
Bridget Riley
This ravishing display of Riley’s art is not only the exhibition of the week, but the year.
• Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, until 22 September
What to see this week in the UK
From Animals to Evita, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...July 29, 2019
‘Wonderfully inane’: the art critic’s view on Boris Johnson’s first photos
The PM seems to be trying to channel Winston Churchill and Barack Obama in his behind-the-scenes pictures. Surely the next step is the Vladimir Putin school of power imagery
Hands in pockets as he pauses on the stairs at Admiralty House before going to see the Queen, Boris Johnson looks at once conscious of the weight of history and boyishly proud. However, while “Action this day” was the wartime slogan of Johnson’s hero, Winston Churchill, the first behind-the-scenes photographs of the new PM by Andrew Parsons, which have been splashed by several newspapers, show that an appropriate motto for Johnson is “Bullshit this day”.
If he isn’t announcing a new railway, he is to be seen thoughtfully staring at three laptops or talking intently with some men and a woman. And yet, like Churchill, he must be seen to be relaxed under pressure. In one photograph, he has put his feet up for a minute and we get a good view of the worn soles of his shoes – still the scruff at heart etc.
Continue reading...July 26, 2019
GCHQ decoded, a silent orchestra and collage's cutting edge – the week in art
Edinburgh makes a splash with an art work to swim in as Leonardo reaches across the centuries to a German sculptor
Samson Young
This Hong Kong artist meditates on the nature of music in thoughtful and entertaining installations, including a film of a silent orchestra. He’s out of his Cage.
• Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, until 5 October.
Edinburgh art festival review – from the sublime to the meaningless
A retrospective of Bridget Riley is truly dazzling, a history of collage makes the cut, but the rest of Edinburgh’s annual art showcase is a mixed bag
See our gallery of festival artworksBridget Riley should be illegal. After a few minutes in her sensational retrospective at the Scottish National Gallery my perceptions were all over the place. Paintings were rocking and rolling through grand white salons, moving in waves, sending hills and troughs from their flat surfaces into three-dimensional space. One Riley makes you larger, one makes you small, and the rest of the Edinburgh art festival doesn’t do anything at all.
Riley is 88 but her art has never felt younger than it does in this scintillating exhibition. It’s the display her art has long deserved – one that does justice to her experimental spirit and dazzling intelligence over six decades, without losing sight of the 1960s utopianism that is her enduring legacy. It refuses to plod along in chronological order. Instead, it starts with a brilliant spin through her fascination with the dappled optical art of Georges Seurat. In 1960 she painted Pink Landscape, a rural vista that bursts into a vibrating light show of separated spots of blue, pink and gold. No sooner have your eyes acclimatised to this unreal pointillism that they’re being taken for a ride by the black and white visual trickery of 1961’s Movement in Squares, whose mind-boggling array of narrowing rectangles, like a phantasmagorical chess board, sucks you into what feels like a fold in the fabric of reality.
Continue reading...What to see this week in the UK
From The Chambermaid to David Batchelor, here’s our pick of the best films, concerts, exhibitions, theatre and dance over the next seven days
Continue reading...Jonathan Jones's Blog
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